Old Henry (2021) is a rather grim, traditional Western -- it proceeds at the pace of Old Paint plodding across the badlands, something that is okay with respect to this sort of movie. The picture is decidedly low-budget but reasonably well-made. (In the very first shot, the camera tilts down from some treetops to show a wooded landscape at dusk -- on the left lower side of the screen, about two-hundred yards from the camera, there are a pair of headlights glowing in the distance; the film is set in 1906 and I'm astonished that this obvious mistake wasn't erased by CGI: maybe, it's some kind of "in" joke.) The movie has no female actors; mercifully, the women in the movie died from the rigors of frontier before the gory action depicted on screen.
Old Henry is a middle-aged sodbuster who lives on a remote farm in Oklahoma's Indian territory. There are no towns, no roads, no railroad; Old Henry's only neighbor seems to be his burly brother-in-law, a guy who resembles Hoss on the old Bonanza Tv show. Three bad hombres, who have the worst luck of any villains in movie history, are hunting for one of their colleagues who has absconded with a saddle-bag full of banknotes. We see them torturing another hapless accomplice in the gruesome opening scene -- this establishes their bona fides as very bad dudes. Old Henry in a brief voice-over tells us about his past: the was born in New York City, moved to Arizona and, then, New Mexico, doing a variety of jobs some of which he prefers not to remember. (Students of Western gunfighters will readily figure out the identity of our hero from this brief resume -- however, I must admit that I didn't grasp this central and surprising plot point until the big reveal just before Henry slaughters all the bad guys.) We see Henry involved with his son Wyatt and the brother-in-law that I'll call "Hoss" digging a trench and busting up big rocks. This is an example of the sort of narrative imprecision that vexes this movie. What the hell are they doing? Why is it necessary to bust up rocks excavated from a trench four foot deep -- are they laying a pipeline, a fiber-optic cable, building a sewer. For a Western to be successful, details of this sort need to be precisely imagined and clearly shown -- period authenticity is one of the pleasures of the genre. Obviously, the film maker simply wants to show that farming is hard work and that the easy riches resulting from outlawry are tempting in this context. But the scene is botched because it makes the characters (whom we are supposed to admire albeit with reservations) look stupid. There's some father and son tension about Old Henry's farming, hard labor to which Wyatt takes umbrage. Then, a horse smeared with blood trots over the hill. Old Henry, an expert tracker, goes out to find the horse's rider. He discovers a badly wounded man who is comatose and the satchel full of bank notes. At first, Old Henry just walks away from the fatal saddle-bag. But he goes back to retrieve the filthy lucre and this is the pivot on which the narrative turns. Of course, the bad hombres come to collect their loot. And, so, the film evolves into a protracted siege at the cabin. Cabin sieges were common in old West range wars -- for instance, both the Lincoln and Johnson County wars involved bloody sieges of this sort and scenes of this kind are a staple in Westerns (see particularly the Coen brothers True Grit, a film that Old Henry resembles in some ways and Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as well as Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun.) The action scenes are well-staged and the climactic gun battle is impressively choreographed although it devolves into idiocy when Old Henry guns down most of the gang, augmented by about eight gunmen recruited from "Chickashaw," and the bad guys, now overmatched by the sodbuster's almost supernatural skills with a six-shooter, hang around to let him kill the rest of them as well. (You have to admire the fortitude of these bad guys who end up doomed by the hero's prowess, but manfully continue the battle until they are killed to the last man.) Just before the final shoot-out, we learn the secret identity of Old Henry, a name that I won't reveal here, but which should be pretty obvious by now. Father and son reconcile while Henry lies dying on the floor, gut shot in the final duel. The movie makers don't know how to end the film. We see Wyatt riding over the hill with a a pack horse that is heavily laden -- what is he taking from the spartan cabin that he is now leaving behind after having interred pa next to ma in the family grave-yard? It's a weirdly non-committal set of images and doesn't really bring the film to any kind of satisfying conclusion.
Old Henry was produced by Tim Blake Nelson who plays the titular role. Nelson is lean and sinewy, but not a conventional action hero and this contributes to the film's interest. He has a strangely asymmetrical face in some scenes, squinting at his adversaries like Jack Elam. (He also looks quite a bit like the real outlaw that he is playing -- there are a couple of famous pictures of this man and Nelson is about as ugly as the original, albeit now aged by about 25 years.) The dialogue is terse but eloquent -- everyone talks in elaborate Latinate diction including the bad guys. In the big shootout, the hero distracts the villains by speaking fluently in Spanish. This is another clue as to Old Henry's original identity. As the bad guys are trying to figure out what Old Henry is saying, he guns down about five of them. The picture resembles a prairie version of David Cronenberg's masterful A History of Violence but, unlike that picture, the hero takes all sorts of unnecessary risks and seems very nonchalant in the gun battle, resulting in his death due to sheer negligence -- this seemed implausible to me in a film about a lethal gunfighter, but maybe Old Henry is just out of practice. The cowboy that Old Henry rescues has weird wounds that sometimes totally disable him and, other times, are inconsequential. He keeps getting shot but always revives. When we first see him, he's got a bullet hole in his chest and seems a goner -- but Old Henry applies some "witch hazel" so that he revives only to get shot a few more times in the cabin siege. Similarly, in the final duel between Old Henry and boss-villain, both of them just keep getting shot, although they continue the battle until, at last, Old Henry wins, a pyrrhic victory since he's been gut shot. There's some confusing stuff about the bad guys being literally branded like cattle. This didn't make any sense to me.
I like Westerns and enjoy their conventions, even when they are moronic, and I thought this slight, unassuming and gruesome picture was reasonably entertaining. However, most viewers, I think, would not be much impressed with this movie although it has good reviews. IMDB says that the movie grossed something like $44,000, probably about the cost of the on-location catering services.) Unlike many films made today, the movie doesn't feature legions of CGI techs and has a fairly short set of closing credits. The landscapes in the movie involve autumnal woods and big open prairies with shelter-belts (seemingly) enclosing them -- the picture was shot in a completely nondescript location in Tennessee. Slugs get pulled out of bloody wounds in close-up (much screaming). There are pigs and someone gets fed to them.
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